Robert Frost's Last Words

 Recently, I came across the poet Robert Frost's epithath on his grave stone: 

                "I HAD A LOVER'S QUARREL WITH THE WORLD."

Why would he say that?  A little googling will tell you that Frost wrote a poem entitled, "The Lesson for Today".  He recited it at an event celebrating a Harvard University's Phi Beta Kappa Society's Anniversary.  It isn't a popular poem.  It is full of obscure references, that maybe the brothers in Phi Beta Kappa knew, but not we uninitiated.  However, the poem's last stanza reads:

“I hold your doctrine of Memento Mori
And were an epitaph to be my story,
I’d have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

One of the last interviews Frost did, before he died, was a documentary by Shirley Clarke, where the program was called, "I had a lover's quarrel with the world."  Perhaps, this is why it is on his gravestone.

 What do you want on your headstone?

 

Apples and apples and apples and apples and apples and apples and apples and apples ad infinitum.

Robert Frost's poem about being tired of picking apples brought back memories.  He's tired of it.  Once he thought he'd love apple trees.  How nice!  But it was too much!

When I was newly married, we lived in a tenement.  We saved and saved to buy our own house.  When we finally had enough money we bought an old WWII bungalow.  It was a four-room house with half a dirt cellar, a crawl space for an attic, and one closet.  We thought we had died and gone to heaven.

Best of all was the backyard.  The garden was full of tulips, even black ones.  They were a deep purple that gave the appearance of being black.  There was a cherry tree that was so beautiful that the children in the school across the street were brought over to our yard to view it when it blossomed.  But my favorite jewel in this paradise was a crab apple tree.

Imagine.  I could make apple pies with my own homegrown apples.

I made apple pies for all the five years we lived there.  I picked the apples, most of them fell on the ground.  They were small and misshapen and some were insect-ridden but I thought I had hit the jackpot (for the first few years).  They were so small that it took forever to peel them.  Sometimes I wondered if it were worth peeling because all I would get is a couple of slices.  But when you're young with eyes full of the glory of homemaking you don't see the wormholes but rather the apple pie.  You don't smell the vinegar but rather the freshly baked aroma.

When we outgrew our little bungalow I said goodbye to peeling crab apples.  I now use just a few apples to make a pie, and to think of the hundreds I used to wash, peel and slice to make just one pie! The memories of those halcyon days are cherished but like Robert Frost's After Apple Picking, I got tired of it.

After Apple-Picking

BY ROBERT FROST

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree 

Toward heaven still, 

And there's a barrel that I didn't fill 

Beside it, and there may be two or three 

Apples I didn't pick upon some bough. 

But I am done with apple-picking now. 

Essence of winter sleep is on the night, 

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. 

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight 

I got from looking through a pane of glass 

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough 

And held against the world of hoary grass. 

It melted, and I let it fall and break. 

But I was well 

Upon my way to sleep before it fell, 

And I could tell 

What form my dreaming was about to take. 

Magnified apples appear and disappear, 

Stem end and blossom end, 

And every fleck of russet showing clear. 

My instep arch not only keeps the ache, 

It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. 

I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. 

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin 

The rumbling sound 

Of load on load of apples coming in. 

For I have had too much 

Of apple-picking: I am overtired 

Of the great harvest I myself desired. 

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, 

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. 

For all 

That struck the earth, 

No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, 

Went surely to the cider-apple heap 

As of no worth. 

One can see what will trouble 

This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. 

Were he not gone, 

The woodchuck could say whether it's like his 

Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, 

Or just some human sleep. 

Son of a Gun!

Ha!  I have to laugh.  I'm working on My Favorite Poem Project.  Today, at Franklin Senior Expo, I was talking to my State Representative, Jeffrey Roy.  He's reading at the event.  He chose a Robert Frost poem to read, The Road Not Taken.  We were talking about poetry and Robert Frost.  He was telling me about a quote he had just seen at the Kennedy Library.  He took a picture of it.  I could see that it was a draft Kennedy had written to commemorate Robert Frost, at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College.

At home, I googled, "Kennedy speech at a groundbreaking ceremony for Rober Frost Library at Am..." that's as far as I got because my computer blinked.  And on
my screen was just a large microphone.

It surprised me.  Here I was writing this long sentence, "Kennedy speech at groundbreaking ceremony for Robert Frost Library at Amherst College" and now I had to write it again.  Again!

Out of my mouth came, "SON OF A GUN!" 

and instantaneously I was given Son of a Gun

www.sonofagunrestaurant.com/

Hip, nautical-themed restaurant known for its shrimp toast, lobster roll & fried chicken sandwich.

 I repeat "Son of a Gun!"